Akeelah & The Bee is about a bee. A spelling bee. Perhaps that doesn’t really mean a whole lot, because well, everyone can relate to spelling bees.

The story itself starts off pretty simply. Black girl, inner-city school. The kids wear uniforms, but aren’t well funded. Some teachers see young girl’s potential and encourage her to enter the school’s spelling bee. Principal see’s spelling bee as a chance to give the school some well needed attention, because it might help his students.

After Akeelah pummels her peers in the spelling bee, principal encourages his old college friend who happens to be a UCLA professor to tutor this young girl who he thinks has the potential to go “all the way.” All the way to the big dance. The Scripps National Spelling Bee.

We learn of Akeelah’s story. Her dad was killed when she was young, her mom works long hours. Her sister presumably has a baby young, while she has a brother in the military encouraging her and another brother who is teetering the line between good and bad. Familar story in a lot of ways.

And horribly predictable. I mean, I didn’t like the way it was written in almost such an overtly cliche way that it fed into all sorts of people’s ideas of how kids from “those” cities live. And yet, I knew it would redeem itself. Ok, I didn’t know that.

But i hoped it would. Pushed by her college professor tutor — played by Laurence Fishburne — Akeelah makes it all the way to the state competition and eventually to the National Bee. Magically, things transform. As people get word of the story, the media starts to descend upon her otherwise unremarkable school, to see the smiling colored miracle.

But something else happens, too. The entire community — yes, I said community, not ghetto, not “hood” or anything else. But the entire community — surrounds this girl with goodwill. Whether it was the dudes who were probably steering her brother down the wrong road, to the shopkeepers. Everyone rallied together.

It’s a story that isn’t told and that a lot of people don’t think exists. Her life was something like the tale of two cities, some sort of modern-day paradox where she encounters sirens one minute and the mailman who helps her study the next.

And yet, it wasn’t just plausible. It was real. Akeelah & The Bee was the first movie — the first — I’ve ever seen that I could relate to in a real way. I mean, you always have elements of a movie you can understand. Or a story that you can say “oh sure, that’s happened to me.” But 8 times out of ten, the face on the screen who is the protagonist or the hero doesn’t look anything like me. That’s probably not entirely true, but…I think the fact that this was a movie about a child made it a lot easier to relate to. So that’s all I mean by that.

But, the simplicity of this story spoke volumes. It was about a girl who embraced an idea that she could instead of believing she could not. Angela Bassett, who played the mother in this story, told her daughter prior to the national bee that she had coaches everywhere, she just had to look. And you know what? She did. There are few things more powerful than being in a situation where you can be around people who make you feel validated and successful. Not just because they encourage you, but instead because they expect you to be successful and don’t assume anything less than that.

Akeelah & The Bee is a movie that anyone can relate to, regardless of where you grew up or how. It’s a story that’s needed to be told and recalls thousands of others that should be and never will be told. Though, I hope the symbols on the screen motivate some young kid out there to dare to dream and believe in themselves. That’s something we never hear enough of — whether we’re 11 or 111.